InfoWorld's Peter Wayner reports on once niche programming languages gaining mind share among enterprise developers for their unique abilities to provide solutions to increasingly common problems. From Python to R to Erlang, each is being increasingly viewed as an essential tool for prototyping on the Web, hacking big data sets, providing quick predictive modeling, powering NoSQL experiments, and unlocking the massive parallelism of today's GPUs.

What we really need in computer programming is a bit more science and a LOT less marketing these days. We need folks with common sense, the ability to stand up and call bulls*** to all the crap folks pull in meetings and political agenda moves in projects. The language matters, sure. But the first language to master is the one vocalized between members of a team, the customers, and of course the documentation folks. Compiling, ya right, how about 'lost in translation'.